Russia took the 20th place in Country Branding Ranking 2012

Bloom Consulting Company released a new annual Country Branding Ranking. According to this ranking the USA continues its reign as the world leader in the 2012 Country Brand Ranking both for Trade and for Tourism, the strong overall performance and excellent CBS Rating ensured its’ continued dominance. For the first time, the United Arab Emirates, joined some of the Asian Tiger economies in the top 25 both in the Tourism and Trade Rankings.

Asia performed extremely well in the 2012 Ranking. Eight Asian countries finished in the top 25, with China as number four. Aided by both strong tourism receipts and CBS Ratings, Thailand (6) and Malaysia (14) significantly improved from last year. For the first time, Macao was evaluated as an individual country and finished with a bang at number eight. A notable absence was Japan.

Russia takes the 20^th place in this ranking between Croatia and Portugal. The progress is called here “Slightly Strong”.

CBS Rating is calculated using brand strategy economic performance analysis and analysis of Online Search Demand. The country brand strategy is measured through brand tags, the key words that reflect the brand strategy of each country. For the first time in any country or nation brand ranking, Bloom’s Online Search Demand (OSD) is able to show if a country supplies what tourists are seeking, and how well the country is matching this demand.

Brand tags function as the ‘supply’ side of the tourist-destination equation. Thousands of brand tags were collected from each country’s official tourism agency and then classified into 38 different clusters that relate to adventure sports and activities, natural features, local culture and traditions, or gastronomy. Each cluster is assigned an economic value in order to rate the relative returns gained from each brand tag.

Domestic and international tourist searches for the brand tags and related words were then analyzed, country by country, in the most used search engines, to show the country’s accuracy match and quantify Online Search Demand. By considering the OSD, Bloom Consulting is able to show if a country offers what tourists are seeking, and how well the country is matching this demand. This identifies the gap between supply and demand. The more accurate a country is, the better the CBS Rating.

The Ranking for Tourism you can see here - http://www.bloom-consulting.com/sites/default/files/files/Bloom_Consulting_Country_Brand_Ranking_Tourism_2012.pdf 

A new fragrant park appeared in place of dust-heap in Tianjin, China

Turenscape architects created a stable garden system and called it self-generated landscape design, so they transformed former dust-heap into nature corner for Tianjin residents.

Tianjin district is situated in the north-east of China, its population is about 15 million people and there is no speech about good ecology here. This city is an industrial centre of China: petrochemistry, metal processing, automobile, textile industries and others.

 

For many years there was a great dust-heap on the outskirts. The district got a name of the most criminal. And people required to reform this territory and to improve residents’ lives. In 2003 municipality asked Turenscape Arcitects company to restore this place and in two years new many-tier park Qiaoyuan extended on the area of 23 hectares. Flat and watery spaces, dirty and salty soils don’t give a possibility to plant here exotic and unaccustomed trees and flowers. So architects made some garden spaces and paid an attention to local flora and fauna richness and diversity. Plants are usual for this region and climate, they don’t require a great care. The park made is by special technology which gathers rain-water from neighborhood and carries to plants.

 

 Besides boggy soil didn’t make it possible to plant a lot of trees, but to make embankment of some meters also was bad because such way it would impossible to see park from the city. So architects decided to make many levels in the Qiaoyuan park: now there are cascades united by bridges. 

 

The new place for relaxation and seclusion became very popular between residents and guests of the industrial city: more than 200 thousands people visited this place. Qiaoyuan has a lot of terraces situated at different levels, also there are many ponds, grass-plots and flower-beds. Paths and red bridges offer people many variants of routs to go here. The park became a favorite place for families with children and even for biologists and architects who do researches here.

 

This is not infrequent example of Chinese planting of greenery in depressive territories. Soon in Beijing the International Park and Garden Exhibition will be. On the Beijing south-west in the place of former dust-heap a great park was built: 513 hectares including 246 hectares of an artificial lake. It’s interesting that there was a great sand-pit of 140 hectares which was used for debris.

 

During three years of building there 12 millions of bushes were planted, former pit transformed into flower valley where eight landscape of the ancient Beijing were depicted. Also many new technologies and materials were used there: watertight bricks on the paths, water saving systems. Thanks to this park an exhibition will be the most dimensioned in the China history. Tianjin and Beijing really demonstrate how many different ways exist to greening dirty industrial zones.

 

 

by Valentin Ivanov

 

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How the Chinese and the Swedes remove their garbage

China is too big and populous country. Especially densely populated city is its capital Beijing. And to manage rubbish is always very difficult. Specialists assert that by 2020 big cities like Beijing will not overcome it.

China has its own opinion about this problem. There are more than 170 thousand waste recycling stations. Rubbish gathering is separate and very wide business branch. It also places in a job for thousands of people most and of them are migrants as a rule. Every morning dustmen “saddle” their tricycles to gather bottles, foam plastic or debris and take it to recycling station. It’s amazing, what are people ready to do to make a lot of money. What is harder: drag waste or gather a way it not to fall down?

The stations have both advantages and disadvantages. The main drawback is insanitary conditions and harm to health of local citizens. The global urbanization has such consequences. And what is to do with household appliances? Today China is the biggest producer of computers, TV sets and refrigerators and it is necessary to think up new way to utilize or recycle it.

7 000 km away in Europe there is absolutely another system of waste recycling. So, Swedish families living in private houses pay half-price for the removal. But with one condition: people themselves separate and sort tin, paper, plastic, glass and punch organic waste.

The removal system in the apartment buildings is a little bit different. There are special containers for plastic, glass and tin, other separated rubbish and all the rest go to dustbins. Hazardous waste is taken to the special ecological stations situated at the gas stations, for example. There are blue containers for photo chemicals, inks, oils, dissolvent, fluorescent lamps; green-red containers for accumulators and batteries.

Somewhere special machines gather old newspaper, magazines and waste paper: people must leave it in front of their doors. Also in Sweden aluminum tins are given back for money. And glass is thrown out to green or white containers for transparent or colored glass respectively.

It is obvious how are different the removal systems in Sweden and China.

by Valentin Ivanov

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